cuiltheory
There was a silver drape over the place where the stage should've been. Something screamed out in the back of her head, the color red, the absence, the gaping hole where there should've been chairs and wood planks and applause. Where had it gone? What kind of thing was capable of taking it? And why was the silver curtain moving in that rhythm, so familiar, so similar to---breathing?
There was a whole sandstorm in her eyes. She'd woken after a thousand year slumber, and her eyelids were caked shut with something thicker than mud and harder than stone. Slowly, she tested her bindings, waiting for the hard clay that covered every inch of her old flesh to crack and fall apart, as she rose. Rose out of dust and time to shower a world that had forgotten her in her ancient gold and glory.
The music filled the room like the screams of innocents. It was heartbreaking, attention-grabbing, and everyone immediately stopped talking, stopped breathing, stopped laughing, and looked up, towards the front, where the old man had picked up a violin and begun to play. Recognition slowly dawned across the room, sweeping over them like the sun over an empty field. It was the forbidden waltz, and it would kill them all.
Their fingers stuck together like a lock, on a storage locker or a dead man's coffin in a world where they were all scared of the deceased rising to join the living once more. After a while, they began to remind her of the briars and roses that crawled up the brick walls of her grandmother's house, digging in and slowly scraping away at the mortar. She felt the thorns in her flesh, she felt the blood it drew and the way it tasted on her lips. Like copper stuck together with green brought on by time and oxidation.